This feature presents conditional market history — where each measure sits against its own past, and what individually-listed price paths followed its extremes. It makes and tests no predictive claim; no validated status exists for it. We present the record; we do not assert predictive skill.
Shiller CAPE. Price against the ten-year average of real earnings (Shiller's cyclically adjusted P/E) — earnings power.
Buffett Indicator. Total US market capitalization against GDP — economic size.
Household Equity Allocation. The share of household financial assets held in equities — positioning.
Excess CAPE Yield. The CAPE earnings yield minus the ten-year real interest rate — what stocks yield over bonds after inflation, on Shiller’s own convention. Low is expensive.
Four lenses because they cover four mechanisms — earnings power, economic size, positioning, and the margin over bonds. The trailing P/E (sp500_pe) was examined and excluded: it inverts at earnings collapses — it read roughly 120 at the 2009 lows — the failure CAPE was constructed to fix. Excess CAPE Yield (ECY) arrived last and by the route the charter requires: chartered by amendment (VR-DR-6) and shipped in July 2026 as the fourth lens, with its own sourcing arc, its own register and its own methodology.
Each reading is ranked only against the measure’s own history up to that month — an expanding window with no hindsight, starting after a 120-month burn-in (40 quarters for the quarterly allocation share). The expensive tier is the 95th percentile and above; the cheap tier is the bottom fifth. The asymmetry is deliberate: under an expanding window the market sat in CAPE's top fifth for roughly 33 of the last 35 years — a top-quintile register is a register of the permanent; extremes are episodic, so the expensive tier sits at p95. An era needs at least two consecutive months (quarters for the allocation share) in tier; one month out ends it — a visual cluster on the chart may be several register rows. Historical bands never change; only the right edge is live. The shaded eras and the tables are defined by the percentile basis; sigma is a reading beside them, not a second set of eras.
The CAPE trend card. The CAPE page's second today-card reads the stored cape_trend_deviation series — how far today's CAPE sits from its own expanding log-linear trend, in residual sigmas (the VR-DR-4-C fit, recomputed nightly by the site's pipeline, never at page load) — classified on the house five-rung ladder with boundaries at ±1σ and ±2σ. The percentile answers how expensive versus all history; the trend sigma answers how stretched versus where the trend expected it today — two questions, two answers.
The percentile ranks today against every reading in the measure's history; sigma measures today against the measure's own fitted trend (Grantham's basis — log-linear for CAPE and the Buffett indicator, linear for the allocation share, both fit only on data available at the time, including the current reading). The bases can disagree — today every lens sits above its 99th percentile while none is two sigma above its own trend — and the disagreement is information: the percentile asks 'high versus all of history?', sigma asks 'stretched versus its own path?'. Sigma readings in each measure's first twenty-four eligible periods are numerically unstable while the trend line is still settling, and are excluded from the historical summaries. The sigma shown on individual indicator pages is a different instrument: distance from the all-history average, with no trend — for a measure that drifts upward across decades it reads far higher than the distance from the measure's own fitted path shown here. The basis is Grantham's; the settings are ours and stated — an expanding point-in-time window including the current reading, log-linear for the ratio lenses and linear for the allocation share — so trend-deviation figures published elsewhere, fit with hindsight or under other settings, may differ.
CAPE never entered its bottom fifth at the 2009 trough — at roughly 13 against a 128-year history reaching single digits, it read near its own median in real time; buyers in March 2009 did historically well anyway, and that miss is the most documented limitation of the lens. The Buffett indicator's single cheap era is 2009 — partly because its history only begins in 1989. No single lens is the instrument; the panel is. Tier definitions are never adjusted to make a known-good date qualify.
Valuation history begins in 1881; the site’s daily S&P price tape begins in December 1927. The register’s path columns originally stopped at that price floor — fifteen pre-1928 eras were listed without outcomes. The total-return series (sp500_tr, monthly, 1871→) removed the reason: every era in the register now carries its full outcome path, on the same total-return conventions as every other row (VR-DR-8, August 2026). The daily price floor still governs only what the price chart can draw.
Paths are S&P total return · Shiller monthly convention (dividends reinvested monthly; sp500_tr). The chart above remains the price tape. "Worst after" is the deepest monthly total-return level in the 36 months after each era — month-end grain, no intra-month lows. Construction and fidelity pins: "The total-return basis" on the Confluence methodology. Historical record, not a forecast.
Quarterly, the registers extend mechanically: open horizons resolve, newly completed eras append, and the forward-path tally is re-taken. Nothing is regraded — there are no calls to grade.